“But I never forgot about Leroy. It was my secret.” Her smile is wistful. “I’d picture him in the city, in some fancy car or restaurant or just walking on the sidewalk in a flashy suit. I’d fancy him thinking of me. Wishing I were there with him. Some days I believed I’d go. I fantasized about it. I’d just start walking and never come back. Better yet, he’d write me a letter, begging me to join him, and I would. Oh, how I fantasized about that. How I’d join him in some big city and we’d live happily ever after.…

“But the babies came and life intervened.” She falls silent, thoughtful. “Thirty years have passed, and my life has been a lie. All of it. A life based on deceit. And secrets. And sin. So much sin.”

“Abigail, what happened to Leroy?”

“It was his own doing, but I can’t fault him. He couldn’t have known it would cost him his life.” A sound of despair squeezes from her throat. “The day before Leroy and I were supposed to run away together, while I was away cleaning house for a neighbor who’d just had a baby, he came here to ask my datt for permission to marry me. Jeramy was here. My datt. My brother. Mamm. Can you imagine?” A breath shudders out of her. “But there were too many hard feelings. Too much hatred. The men argued, especially Jeramy and Leroy. So much that my mamm asked them to leave the house. And so they came here, to this barn, to talk.” She spreads her arms to indicate the very building in which we’re standing. “But the talk quickly turned to an argument. Jeramy and Leroy fought. Somehow, Leroy fell from the loft into the pen below. Struck his head on the concrete.” As if envisioning the scene in her head, she looks down at the pen. “He never woke up.”

“How do you know all of this?” I ask. “Did Jeramy tell you?”

She nods. “When I read about the discovery of those bones and the ring, I knew it was Leroy. And so I asked Jeramy. Finally, after all these years, he told me the truth.”

I think about the remains and evidence of tooth marks on the bones, and I wonder if she knows the hogs fed on her lover’s body, possibly while he was still alive.…

“Jeramy and Leroy fought about you?” I ask.

“And ideology.” She offers a sad smile. “I was a pretty girl back then. Both men were in love with me. I supposed I loved both of them, too, but in different ways. Jeramy was the stable one. Handsome. Upstanding. The one everyone respected.” Her smile shifts; the secret smile of a woman in love. “But it was Leroy with all of his crazy dreams that set my seventeen-year-old heart on fire.”

“Was Leroy’s death an accident?”